The eternal fear of the white man

South Africa, 1994.

The country moved from white minority-rule to freedom and full political rights for all of South Africa's peoples. I remember the celebrations when Nelson Mandela was elected the first post-apartheid president. It was all part of the general euphoria still existent from the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.

But I also remember something darker.

"The South African Blacks are going to murder all the whites. It will be a bloodbath!"

"South Africa is a developed economy. The Blacks will turn it into Zambia."

And so on.

Elon Musk grew up in that time. For a long while he pretended to be part of the new South Africa. Post-apartheid. Post-white dominance. The Rainbow Nation.

Of course, he was nothing of the kind. The racism he imbibed at the feet of his grandmother, who fled Canada for racist South Africa, is his true nature. Increasingly the mask began to fall. His fealty to Donald Trump and the white genocide discourse should be no surprise. 

Of course, Musk is not alone in this. Long before he took over Twitter, warnings of "white genocide" were rife on the platform. I engaged with a few such lunatics. And the center of their fear? The murders of white farmers in South Africa, which although unfortunate, were not in the "thousands" claimed by the proponents. Afrikaners had more to fear from a Black population under apartheid than they did after the end of the racist caste system.

This past weekend we've seen the latest irruption of this fear of white people succumbing to genocidal fury. The neo-Nazi AfD in Germany won the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. It is the first time a party of the far right has won control of any part of Germany since the end of the Second World War. And the core of its allure for its voters is its stand against immigration. It paints immigration in apocalyptic terms, fretting that a wave of non-Germans will flood the country and put native, white Germans to the sword. It is nothing less than a repeat of Nazi rhetoric about German Jews. We know how that turned out.

It seems that white people are very nervous. They fear that as their privileges ebb, they will be oppressed in return for the oppression of non-white populations over the past four centuries. Visions of blood and slaughter, as above, abound. It seems inconceivable to people who tremble in fear at such a future that no one wants to impose a genocidal regime on them. That, perhaps, we just want to be able to get on with and enjoy our lives. That all we want is the end of white supremacy and replaced by a regime where character matters much more than surface skin color. That carrying out a genocidal project goes against hardwired human morality, and breaking through those barriers would require the kind of targeted incitement seen not only in Nazi Germany, but more recently in Rwanda and Cambodia. 

Why are people like Elon so worried? Are they afraid that their chickens will come home to roost? Or, even worse: that they, in some way, deserve to be destroyed?

Here's the thing: white men are a minority, globally. Their power has been due to the West's scientific and technological advantages, not to numerical superiority. And yet in colonies where they were the numerical minority, they were not wiped out when the colonized gained freedom. Not the French in North Africa. Not the Afrikaners. Not the remnants of the Rhodesian regime. I'm not assigning noble intentions to the newly-free peoples. It's simply that organizing mass, eliminationist violence is not a choice most polities choose. Six decades of decolonization have not led to massacres of white people. 

Maybe Jerr and Elon should wonder what it is that they fear so much, and why. Because the world is moving on at increasing speed, and while they're amassing arsenals for a race war which will never come, they will be left behind. And perhaps that is the fear.